Hospital Records allies with new YouTube music licensing platform Lickd

Hospital Records has allied with Lickd, a start-up business looking to provide music rights owners with a new way to generate revenue on YouTube.

Lickd has been founded by Paul Sampson, who was previously with CueSongs, another company that was seeking to find new licensing opportunities on sites like the Google video platform. The new firm’s plan is to allow content creators on YouTube to license commercially released tracks for use in their videos in a simple and cost-effective way.

Under that plan, the label earns an upfront fee and the YouTuber knows that their videos won’t be blocked as a result of a copyright claim by a record company. Such concerns about having videos – and ultimately entire channels – blocked by YouTube’s Content ID system have led many YouTube creators to use production music rather than commercially released tracks in their videos. And that, Lickd reckons, is lost income to labels.

Sampson says that the long-term goal of his business is “to help the music business close the ‘value gap’ – the disparity between how much revenue-per-stream it gets from YouTube, a UGC video site, and the revenue-per-stream it gets from the streaming platforms. The fact that YouTube doubles up as the world’s largest streaming platform means it’s time the music industry made social technology part of the solution, rather than the problem”.

Technically speaking, the tricky bit of offering a service of this kind is integrating with YouTube’s Content ID rights management system to ensure that videos containing music licensed via Lickd don’t get automatically blocked. The start-up says that its “proprietary Vouch software – the first automated solution of its kind – integrates with Content ID and reassures it that the user has a legal licence to use a particular track”.

As Lickd launched in beta on Monday, it also announced a deal with Hospital Records, which plans to make most of its back catalogue and new releases available via the new YouTube-focused micro-licensing platform.

The label’s Romy Harber confirmed the tie-up, saying: “YouTube creators are becoming huge stars in their own right and Lickd gives us a great way to access that market. It’s an exciting prospect, and we look forward to working with them – enabling creators to use upfront music from our artists”.